Digital Acting

Date: Oct 12, 2001

Bringing your character to life means being able to think and breathe like your character – essentially, understanding the techniques of acting. In this article, George Maestri teaches a crash course in acting for the animator.

Acting

In many respects, animators are actors who use a mouse, a pencil, or clay to bring a character to life. An actor is a natural show-off, someone who always wants to be in the spotlight. Animators tend to hide behind their CRTs and light tables, but the performers that they create must have the same vitality as any created in live action.

Bringing your character to life in a convincing manner means understanding the techniques of acting—being able to think and breathe like your character. When you truly step into a character, the actual act of animating will become a bit of a blur. You will simply be the conduit from the character to the mouse.

Acting vs. Animating

Plenty of people and schools can teach you how to act. These can be of great value to an animator. As you become more involved with creating characters, you can draw upon many techniques from the art of acting.

Acting, however, is fundamentally different than animation. Acting happens in real time, usually in front of an audience. Actors need to learn how to deal with the here and now.

Animation happens a frame at a time. You go through many of the processes that an actor goes through, but the actual motions are translated through the mouse into the computer. Animators have the luxury of going back over a performance frame by frame until it is deemed perfect.

Acting and Story

The characters that you animate are the storytellers. They need to convey the script to the audience in a convincing and entertaining manner. The greatest story in the world will be ruined if told by a poor storyteller. To make the story jump off the screen, you need to understand the story, the story structure, and how each scene moves the story forward.

Each scene has an objective, a point that it needs to get across. Each character within the scene also has an objective. A policeman wants to take the criminal to jail. The criminal's objective is freedom. How these two objectives work out determines how the story progresses, If the criminal escapes, you have "The Fugitive." If he goes to jail, you have a different story. When you are animating a scene, be clear on your character's objective and how it affects the story.

Know Your Characters

The foundation of good acting is understanding who your character is and what makes it tick. If you truly know your character, you will innately know how and when the character will move and react to the world. Understanding a character can be a long and involved process, and actors use many techniques to accomplish this. The first thing you need to do is answer a few simple questions about the character.

To answer these questions, you can create a simple character description. Many times the writer will do this as part of writing process. If you are animating a one-shot character in a commercial, however, you may have to come up with your own description.

A character description is a paragraph or less, and it simply goes over the basics of the character—usually just the important things, such as age, sex, and personality. Here are two character descriptions for "Karen & Kirby," a series of interstitials that I produced for Warner Bros.

Figure 1 Karen Jones.

KAREN JONES: Karen is 9 years old and the second most popular girl in school. She's high-maintenance and used to having things her way, the easy way. This is not to say that she's spoiled. Karen is very likeable, and absolutely everyone likes Karen. Because of this, things just naturally tend to go her way. She looks to Kirby as a brother and a trusted companion. Karen lives with her dad in a low-slung suburban bungalow that's quite stylish and very neat.

Figure 2 Kirby Derwood.

KIRBY DERWOOD: Kirby is 10 years old and the second most unpopular kid in school. Clever and intelligent, he takes great delight in creating very complex solutions to very simple problems, which causes things to blow up in his face. Kirby is a bit of a neurotic—if things don't go as planned, he tends to freak out. This happens a lot. Kirby lives with his dad in a small airstream trailer parked in Karen's backyard that's very cramped and somewhat messy.

Acting Technique

Once you understand your character, you will need to put that knowledge into action by acting and performing the character. Acting is an art form, and, like any art form, it has a number of core principles. These principles, however, are only the tip of the iceberg. As with any art form, the deeper you explore, the more you will see there is to learn.

Creating Empathy

The big goal of an animator, as well as the writers, is to create empathy for the character. Empathy means that the audience emotionally connects with the character on some level and identifies with him. This is not to be confused with sympathy, where the audience simply feels sorry for someone. When a character evokes sympathy, members of the audience simply say, "I pity that guy." When the audience feels empathy, members of the audience can say, "I know how that guy feels—I've been there myself." An empathic character plays to the heart.

Creating Movement

Until a character moves, it is simply a nicely modeled mannequin. Animating a character—bringing it to life—requires that you move it. The first thing that a novice animator will do is simply start moving body parts around to see what happens. This trial-and-error approach can have its moments, but a professional animator will need much more in the arsenal. First, you need to understand that characters always move for a reason.

Most of the time, people do not think about the individual actions that they perform. When you walk, you usually do not think about placing one foot in front of another. If you're in love, you're thinking about your lover—while you happen to be walking. The emotions will dictate the character of the walking motions.

Cause and Effect

Cause and effect are what drive a story. A story is a sequence of events. Each event has an effect on the next. Cause and effect also drive how a character is animated.

The cause can be any sort of action, from a force of nature to the actions of another character. The effect is how your character deals with those actions. Your character smells smoke—he looks around for flames. Your character sees a bully walking down the street—he decides to turn in the other direction. Your character hears funky music—he starts dancing.

Object of Attention

As we move through the day, our attention shifts from place to place and object to object. Things happen. Those things demand attention.

Right now, your attention is focused on this article. You're exercising only those parts of the body that are used for reading. The rest of your body is relaxed. If the telephone suddenly rang, your attention would shift away to the telephone. You would then exercise those parts of the body needed to travel to the phone and pick up the receiver. As you did this, you would forget about the article momentarily as you focused completely on the phone.

Lee Strasberg would say that that, in this case, the individual's object of attention has changed from this book to the phone. The object of attention is a basic building block with which both actors and the animator works. By having the character concentrate on an object that represents the task at hand, the animator establishes a sense of belief that the character is truly involved in what he is doing.

Clarity

Making your character 100% focused on the task at hand will give your performance clarity. The audience will know exactly what the character is thinking at any given moment. Even when a character is distracted momentarily, he will focus 100% on the distraction for that fleeting moment.

If a dog dashes into the kitchen looking for a drink and encounters a cat, the cat's body suddenly changes its demeanor as it focuses on the new object of attention: the dog. The cat may tense up and arch its back, but it still uses only those muscles necessary to concentrate on its new object of attention. The cat's task has changed; she has momentarily forgotten the toy, and her new task is to put the dog in its place.

The dog's object of attention, which had been water, now becomes the cat, and his original objective to drink water now becomes to growl at the cat. The dog is using only those muscles necessary to accomplish this task. He is focused on the cat, not the water.

Let's take the dog and cat situation a step further. Perhaps the dog becomes indecisive—he really needs that drink, but he still has to deal with that pesky cat. If you simply split the difference, the dog will focus 50% of the way between the cat and the water. The audience will say, "Why is the dog staring into space?"

Even in it's indecision, the dog needs to switch between objects of attention—100% on the water, 100% on the cat. He will look longingly at the water and then turn back to growl at the cat. When he is looking at the water, he can really imagine that cool drink. When he is facing the cat, he is totally absorbed in that task.

Figure 3 When the dog is focused on the water, he can almost taste it.

Figure 4 When the dog is facing the cat, his attention is focused 100% on the cat.

If your character is 100% focused within the scene, the performance will be crystal clear. If the character is not focused, the performance will be muddy. Even when your character cannot make up his mind, he is fully focused on one possibility or the other.

Simplicity

Another way to achieve clarity is through simplicity. There's an old animation adage of "one thing at a time." This is similar to the concept of attention, but it also helps clarify the individual actions. A character trips, then falls, then gets up—he doesn't do them all at once.

You also should be clear on what the individual action represents. Don't animate anger—that's too broad and general. What exactly is the character angry at? It's better to animate "I hate my boss." This will simplify the emotion as well as give your character focus.

In addition, try to simplify each of your character's poses and actions to keep them as clear as possible. The actions are like the links of a chain. They all fit together sequentially. If each action is clear and easily read, then that link of the chain is strong. An overly complex pose or action could possibly break the chain and lose the audience.

These are just the basics of acting technique. As you have seen, acting is very important to the animator's craft. Study your characters and understand them fully before your tackle a scene. When animating, be conscious of your character's personality and the objectives of the scene. The audience need to be able to relate to the characters on the screen; a character always needs to evoke empathy from the audience. Without empathy, you're sunk.